Excerpts from an article by IICPH Director Anna Tilman for the Watershed Sentinel
The Nuclear Industry has a dream of a new renaissance — but their dream could be our nightmare. Already there are large quantities of long-lasting highly radioactive waste at reactor sites sitting in cooling ponds of water with nowhere to go. A nuclear renaissance would only make this desperate problem worse.
Despite all the reports about leaks, shutdowns (temporary and long-term), construction woes, and financial costs, nuclear power proponents continue to portray it as safe, reliable and cheap. Worst of all, they portray it as the solution to climate change.
A reality check on the status of the world nuclear industry, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), shows that as of August 2009, 435 nuclear reactors were operating, generating about 14% of the world’s electricity. Fifty-two units were categorized as “under construction” and many of these units have been in this stage for more than 20 years. About 90% of these power plant projects are concentrated in Europe and Asia, 16 in China alone.
While new plants have come on the grid every year since commercial use of nuclear energy began in 1954, no new nuclear plant was connected to the grid in the year 2008. The most recent nuclear plant to come online was Cernavida-2 in Romania in 2007, a CANDU reactor that took twenty-four years to build,
In 1954, Lewis Strauss, Head of the Atomic Energy Commission, proclaimed that nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter”. The reality has in fact been the reverse. No plant has been built without incurring long lead times and cost overruns. The true financial cost has been hidden by extensive government subsidies, limits on liability for accidents, and not adding the costs for waste storage and plant decommissioning to pricing structures.
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